Role Guides
From virtual assistants to AI engineers, a plain-English guide to the 38 full-time roles you can hire remotely through Remoteli, organised by service area.
Remoteli
9 October 20269 min read
Almost any role that is done at a desk, through software and conversation, can be done remotely. That covers far more than most businesses assume: administration, sales, marketing, customer experience, finance, data, creative work and software development all translate well to a dedicated professional working as part of your team from another country.
This guide walks through the 38 roles Remoteli offers, grouped into eight service areas. For each area you will find what the roles do, how they differ and where to read more. Every role is available at three experience levels: Junior (1–2 years), Mid (3–5 years) and Senior (5+ years).
If you already know the outcome you want but not the job title, start with the problem. “Our inbox is out of control” points to administrative support. “We have leads but no time to follow them up” points to sales development. The sections below are written to help you make that translation.
This is where many businesses make their first remote hire, because the work is well defined and the time it frees up is immediate. There are four roles.
The first two are often confused. Our comparison of virtual assistants and administrative assistants sets out the difference, our guide on how to hire a virtual assistant covers the process from brief to first week, and our virtual assistant interview questions help you test candidates. You can also explore Administrative & Business Support.
A useful rule of thumb: if the work follows one person's priorities, it is a VA role; if it follows the business's processes, it is Administrative or Operations Support. Recruitment & HR Support suits businesses hiring regularly, where coordinating candidates and keeping people records tidy has become a job in its own right.
Sales roles split the commercial process into stages, and hiring for the right stage matters more than hiring someone who is “good at sales” in general.
Sales Development and Business Development are the pair people most often mix up, so we wrote a separate piece on SDR vs BDR, and when to hire your first SDR covers timing. See the Sales & Business Development service for the full role descriptions.
These roles work best when the hand-offs are clear. Agree what a qualified lead looks like, who owns it at each stage and where the information lives in your CRM. A Sales Operations professional often earns their place simply by making that agreement stick.
Marketing roles cover the channels and systems that generate demand. They suit businesses that know what they want to say but lack the hands to run campaigns consistently.
Digital Marketing is the broadest of the four and often the first marketing hire. Our guide to hiring a digital marketer explains what to look for, and in-house vs agency vs remote marketer compares the ways to resource it. More detail is on the Marketing & Advertising service page.
A practical point when hiring here: give marketing professionals access to your analytics and past campaign results from day one. Without data, even an experienced marketer is guessing, and the first month disappears into rebuilding what you already know.
Customer experience roles protect revenue you have already won. The four roles cover the whole customer lifecycle, from the first support ticket to a long-term relationship.
Support reacts to what customers raise, while success works ahead of problems. Our comparison of customer support and customer success explains when you need each. See the Customer Experience service for more.
Customer experience roles depend heavily on language and coverage hours. As well as English, Remoteli offers French-speaking professionals, recommended from Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire with Rwanda as an alternative, and Arabic-speaking professionals in Egypt, so you can support customers in their own language. Our guides to French-speaking talent in Africa and Arabic-speaking talent in Egypt go into more detail.
These roles support finance and legal teams with accurate, organised administration. They work alongside your accountants, advisers and lawyers rather than replacing their professional judgement.
If you are unsure whether you need help with the books yet, read what a bookkeeper does and when you need one. The Finance & Legal Support service covers all four roles.
Finance and legal work involves sensitive information, so plan access carefully. Decide which systems the professional needs, what they can approve and who reviews their work before it reaches clients or advisers.
Data roles range from making today's numbers clear to building the systems and models behind them. Cybersecurity Support sits here too, because protecting data is part of using it well.
Most businesses need an analyst before a scientist. Our guide to data analyst vs data scientist explains why. Full details are on the Data & Cybersecurity service page.
Whichever data role you choose, the professional will need secure access to the systems where your data lives and a named person who can explain what the numbers mean commercially. Analysis without business context rarely changes decisions.
Creative, Content & Design is the second-largest service area, with six roles. Each one produces a different kind of asset, so it helps to be specific about the output you need.
Creative professionals often work closely with the marketing roles above. Browse the Creative, Content & Design service to compare them.
When you brief a creative role, share examples of work you like and work you do not, along with your brand guidelines and the channels the assets are for. A clear feedback routine, such as one consolidated round of comments per piece, keeps quality high and turnaround quick.
Software Development is the largest service area, with eight roles covering building, shipping and running digital products. Most can join an existing engineering team or work with a technical lead you already have.
Start with our comparison of front-end, back-end and full-stack developers if you are unsure which developer you need, then read how to hire remote software developers. For infrastructure and testing, see when you need a DevOps engineer and QA outsourcing vs a dedicated QA tester. The Software Development service lists every role in detail.
Technical hires need more context than most. Share your stack, how code is reviewed and released, and who makes architectural decisions. That information shapes which role and experience level will succeed.
A few questions narrow the field quickly. What outcome would make the biggest difference in the next three months? Who will this person work with each day? Is the work mostly reactive, such as answering tickets, or proactive, such as building pipeline? The answers usually point to one role more clearly than a job title does.
Experience level is the second decision. Junior professionals suit well-documented, repeatable work with someone to check in with. Senior professionals suit work where they will set the approach themselves. Language and working hours matter too: every Remoteli professional works in business-level English, and French and Arabic are available for roles that need them. Together with experience, those choices determine the recommended talent market, as our explainer on how Remoteli recommends a talent market shows.
Finally, think about how roles combine. A Sales Development professional produces more conversations, which may soon call for Account Management. A new product may need a Full-Stack Developer first and Quality Assurance soon after. Planning the second hire while you make the first keeps a growing team balanced.
When you are ready, the Solution Builder shows the recommended talent market and monthly price for each role at each experience level, and you can add several roles to one solution.
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